Re: List elements (was: Tree Presented Lists )

Daniel Hiester wrote:
> 
> But the thought hit me last week that it seems silly to
> have muiltiple list elements. I could understand the DL
> element being justified, but in specific, having both UL
> and OL sounds to me like the element-heavy, tag-soup-
> friendly HTML, and not the structure-heavy, stripped-down,
> simplified XHTML that I have come to apreciate.

If you want pure structure, you need not have different
elements at all--a single name will do. It /is/ possible to
create a well-structured document of <div>s. The purpose of
markup, however, is not only to convey structure, but also
semantics.

Although their structure is the same, <ol> and <ul> both
exist because they indicate different types of information.

A list of links, for example, is often unordered. It may be
alphebetized, but this is for convenience; the order is not
inherent in the information. If I want to add another link
to the list, it doesn't really matter where I put it.

Directions for installing software should be placed in an
ordered list. You need to insert the disk before you can
run setup, and you need to run setup before you can select
the various installation options. Changing the order of
these list items would affect the information itself, not
just its presentation.

> ...I am confident that one could already use just OL or
> just UL (whichever tickles your fancy), and use stylesheets
> to control how you want it to look. I don't think it makes
> a huge difference whether you state in the markup that it's
> an ordered list or an unordered list, because the UA will
> still only render the list in whatever order the author
> puts it.

Now you're thinking in terms of presentation.

Received on Thursday, 9 August 2001 17:50:28 UTC